Streets of Gold - Hardcover

Mary Antin's The Promised Land, first published in 1912, is a classic memoir of a young Russian Jewish immigrant who came to the U.S. in 1894. This moving picture-book biography for older readers draws on Antin's memoir to tell a pared-down, partly fictionalized story of her childhood: her harsh life in Russia, where the closeness of her family sustained her through years of persecution; the difficulty of leaving the old country; and then her new life in a Boston slum, where at 13 she found the miracle of a free education, even for a Jewish girl. Wells' simple, lyrical first-person narrative is true to the spirit of the original; and with each one-page episode, she includes in the margin a quote from Antin ("I was warmed and watched over at home," she says of her family). Andreasen's luminous, full-page oil paintings are beautiful, maybe too beautiful for this story. The glossy, romantic scenes express little of the hardship of the immigrant struggle, though one unforgettable picture shows racist persecution in harsh detail--the czar's police measure Antin's brother's nose with a ruler, since only short-nosed Jewish boys could attend school. Most moving is Antin's celebration of education. Wells captures the excitement of the 13-year-old immigrant's first day in first grade and her almost immediate astonishing success as a writer ("I dug the words out of my heart," Antin said). As in Mary on Horseback (1998), Wells has found riches in women's history. Teachers may want to use this to introduce more of Antin's original story in the classroom. Hazel Rochman

Among a profusion of books about turn-of-the-century Russian-Jewish emigrants, Wells's (Mary on Horseback) and Andreasen's (Eagle Song) story about Mary Antin (1881-1949) stands out for its exceptional economy and tenderness. Short passages from Anton's memoir The Promised Land appear in margins here, complementing Wells's first-person text. Masha (her name was later Americanized to Mary) begins with a description of her family's life under the czarist regime. Wells avoids rhetoric, striking home with powerful details and images: an official measures her brother's nose with a ruler ("Only short-nosed Jewish boys could attend school"); after Masha's father leaves for America, the first step in the whole family's emigration, the czar's police confiscate all their possessions ("every rickety chair and pair of shoes in our house"). One of the great strengths of the text is its embrace of contradictory elements: in Boston, the Antins' tenement apartment is squalid, yet the school is wonderful. Less than a year after arriving in America, the girl writes an epic verse in praise of George Washington that gets published in a newspaper: she, like Wells and Andreasen, perceives how the slum alleyways can sometimes seem like "streets of gold." Stately oils convincingly express Masha/Mary's sorrow, yearning, confusion and blossoming text and art put a human face on an archetypal experience. Ages 5-up.
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